Baltimore School for the Arts is still picking up the pieces after winter flood

Rosiland “Roz” Cauthen tried not to panic when she rushed to the Baltimore School for the Arts that disastrous February morning.

The executive director of the famed Mount Vernon high school sloshed through 3 feet of standing water on the main floor to find a “river” gushing down to the basement, where the nightmare inside the 100-year-old building multiplied.

“I’m seeing very expensive film equipment sitting in water. One room, the ceiling had just busted open and it looked like just an open rain shower,” Cauthen said. “The costume classroom, where there’s 14 sewing machines, was getting soaking wet.”

Months later, the classrooms are dry, but the school that educated Tupac Shakur, Jada Pinkett Smith and Christian Siriano still doesn’t feel back to normal for its 450 students.

The burst sprinkler line closed the school for weeks and forced students into virtual learning, threatening the performances and projects that are the cornerstones of their education. Then, local arts institutions stepped in to help students make the most of a disrupted year.

BSA was one of at least nine Baltimore schools that had to shut down or delay opening after two weeks of subfreezing temperatures burst pipes across the city this winter. The trouble worsened at BSA when maintenance workers discovered black mold and had to tear out walls and floors. Teachers and their classes were repeatedly shuffled, and some costumes and antiques are still missing.

Repairs cost about $2.5 million because of BSA’s “unique contents and instructional materials,” said Sherry Christian, a Baltimore City Public Schools spokesperson. She said the repairs were paid for by insurance risk claims and that the district added staff to help get the arts equipment accounted for and replaced.

Students spent most of February learning virtually, a challenge for those who had left their art supplies at school or who didn’t have ample space at home to practice their pirouettes. As repairs dragged on, school leaders hunted for ways to get their young artists into anything resembling a classroom or rehearsal space.

Stephanie Moore directs the BSA Foundation, a nonprofit that raises supplementary funds that BSA doesn’t get through the public school system but needs for professional arts training. She coordinated with Mount Vernon arts organizations like The Lyric, the Walters Art Museum and Peabody Preparatory to get students in-person class space and rehearsal time for free.

“Because of that, we were able to kind of keep performances and stuff going once we were able to come back,” Cauthen said. That included Expressions, an annual fundraiser that nets over half a million dollars for BSA and its programs.

The community response was immediate and overwhelming, Moore said, drawing offers from outside of Mount Vernon. But BSA kept classes close to school “because our students know how to get here.”

No one at Peabody Preparatory, a community performing arts school, hesitated to give students rehearsal space, said Franki Graham, the senior department chair for preparatory dance. Dance teachers know their art form is tough to practice over Zoom.

“They can work on their physical stamina and their strength and those types of things independently,” Graham said, “but it’s really about coming together and being able to do those things in the same room at the same time. That’s where the magic of dance happens.”

Some BSA departments had a harder time getting up and running than others. Only one of the school’s two film labs is functioning. The other has 20 new monitors lined up against the wall but no tables to put them on.

Though the film department managed to save student work, the hard drives are all rusted and audio for the Expressions film had to be rerecorded. Screenings of the senior capstone films were rescheduled.

Having her classes scattered around the building disrupted the whole flow and energy of the department, said Beatriz Bufrahi, chair of the film and visual storytelling department. She called the ordeal traumatizing.

“Can we prevent this?” Bufrahi finds herself wondering. “Is it going to happen again?”

The costume department is still missing fabrics and costume pieces from the school’s college-sized collection. Norah Worthington, the resident costumer, said the mannequins are off-kilter on their stands from being moved so many times. A thread storage board used to be mounted on a wall; now it leans against a desk, where it’s prone to falling over, scattering the spools. Worthington said students in her “make-it-work” department have been resilient even as costumes take twice as long to finish.

“I think that’s the hardest part for me, is that everybody’s kind of operating as if we’re normal,” said Worthington, who teaches students to design and sew dance, theater and music costumes for the school’s productions. “But we’re not. Underneath, we won’t be normal maybe until September.”

Before the pipe burst, Ashley Williams, a 17-year-old senior studying stage design and production, had only taken measurements of her 20 actors and drawn rough costume sketches for an April production of “Cymbeline” by William Shakespeare. She became increasingly worried: She was a month behind making and fitting costumes. And that wasn’t the only show she was working on.

Normally, students can hang out and blast music while prepping props and sets. The time crunch meant Ashley didn’t get the typically more relaxed last semester.

“It became very work-heavy instead of just the fun, normal environment that we would have had,” she said.

Ashley had to cut down on fittings and costume changes to make her deadlines while her work was constantly interrupted by ongoing repairs. Those conditions made her even prouder when she saw her designs on stage.

“There are many spaces that have not returned to normal. But as of now, we are trying to make the best out of it that we can,” Ashley said. “I think we’re doing that. We’re turning it back into what we knew it as before the flood.”

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